One man does better job than whole Mozilla organization. I bet Mozilla developers themselves aren't too happy with latest developments - rumor was they were making Pocket native client when it was canned by the management and replaced by 3rd party version + $$.

I remember during first dot-com bubble programmers were in high demand and many EEs shifted to programing, and ever since... I was EE myself and didn't want to do coding... but I had to eventually, and many of my coworkers are programmers with EE background. There's some work for EEs in engineering firms, but programmers are needed by pretty much everyone.

EEs have became what mechanical engineers were before them: not obsolete, but kind of niche profession.

There is a way to properly test software. But it is insanely expensive. Real mission critical software (like airborne systems) has standards for code verification that are pretty tough. For example per standard DO-178B, required is complete structural coverage analysis; object code analysis; worst case throughput analysis; stack analysis, etc.

There's no way that volunteer programs can find funding for this or human resources to do this. Although many companies do contribute to various open source programs, the level of testing required to remove most of bugs is extremely costly. Who's going to pay for software to be nearly perfect, if it is not required of it? Truth it, pretty much nobody outside mission critical software does this kind of testing.

An anonymous reader writes: Privacy International said that citizens have been spied on illegally thanks to the US National Security Agency (NSA) and GCHQ, and the PRISM and Upstream systems, and that the whole truth will out thanks to the decision on data gathered before December 2014.Link to Original Source

mdsolar writes: In Donald Moul’s view, the competitive energy market in Pennsylvania isn’t broken. But the rules that govern it are distorting FirstEnergy’s ability to compete.

Mr. Moul, vice president of commodity operations for FirstEnergy Solutions, said as much on Tuesday to a room full of nuclear operators, analysts and regulators gathered for the Platts 11th Annual Nuclear Energy Conference in Washington, D.C. He places the blame not on normal market functions, he said, but on policy decisions that have eaten away at the value of its coal and nuclear fleet.

“We don’t really have a completely deregulated market,” he said. “We just have a different kind of market.”...

FirstEnergy has plenty at stake. About 57 percent of the company’s total generation comes from coal, and another 23 percent comes from nuclear. It operates four nuclear units — two in Ohio, and two at the Beaver Valley Power Station near Shippingport.

Last summer, the company asked the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission to help make their coal and nuclear plants more competitive in regional auctions that set the price for capacity payments, or charges paid to an electric supplier for agreeing to meet a portion of expected demand.

The company is peeved by the auction’s valuation of demand response — the process by which consumers agree to cut back during times of peak demand — by PJM Interconnection, the regional grid operator tasked by the federal government with ensuring reliability in 13 states and the District of Columbia.

In PJM’s auction last May, bids of demand response earned the same price per megawatt as any other power generator. Demand response comprised 6.5 percent of committed megawatts — up from 0.1 percent a decade ago — while nuclear made up less than 16 percent of commitments, down from 21 percent a decade ago.

FirstEnergy has argued that demand response is a retail product whose regulation should fall to the states, and its complaint with FERC followed a ruling last May from the D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals that generally agreed with that notion. FERC has appealed, and the Supreme Court is expected by this summer to decide whether to hear the case.Link to Original Source

coondoggie writes: NASA this week began exploring a Centennial Challenge program that would require contestants to build spacecraft capable of catching, capturing, and manipulating small objects in space at high speeds.Link to Original Source

jfruh writes: With Google retooling its Glass offering, Sony appears to have jumped into the breach to offer an Android-compatible wearable face-computer. SmartEyeglass is relative bargain at only $840, although it must be manipulated with a separate, wired controller unit that houses a microphone, speakers and an NFC module.Link to Original Source

jfruh writes: European credit card processing generally relies on chip-and-PIN readers, which are considered more secure than the card-swiping devices that prevail in the United States. But security comes at a cost, and up to 20 million small European businesses don't accept credit cards because of the expense of a chip-and-PIN reader. Now a European payments startup is offering the readers for free.Link to Original Source

An anonymous reader writes: Apple has started allowing non-Apple hardware users to use iWork for iCloud, in what may be the first sign of a broader attack on the Microsoft-Google duopoly in productivity suites. A subtle adjustment by Apple has recently allowed anyone to sign up to iWork for iCloud through a browser, effectively turning it into a multi-platform service that can run on devices made by other companies. This article discussed the weaknesses of iWork and the potential.Link to Original Source